Saturday, September 28, 2013

Celebrating the Births . . . Michael G. Coney and Terra LeMay

Michael Greatrex Coney (September 28, 1932 - November 4, 2005)
A British Science Fiction award winning (Aurora and Nebula Award nominated) author, Coney's stories "follow rather ordinary people who are buffeted by forces beyond their strength, and mostly not much concerned with them" and another common theme "is small isolated communities." (Wikipedia)

Fiction
• At Cordula's Web: "The True Worth Of Ruth Villiers" "Borrowed trailer and a bright sunny morning overlooking the English
Channel. Inside, the smell of bacon; outside, the grassy meadow sloping
down to the cliff top. Two boys go by, aged fourteen or so, the age when
life means everything and nothing; and so they are going to climb down
to the beach, two hundred feet below."

Other PDF downloads (direct links via Old Miser)
• At Infinityplus: I Remember Pallahaxi
"This may not seem very important to a human like you; after all, you might say, what’s one stilk more or less? But to me it was a big thing, almost as big as another thing that happened that summer day."

"Lionel Slade examined her face anxiously. She looked pale and washed out, but she smiled when she saw him. She opened the door wider and his misgivings abated."

Terra LeMay (born: 28 September 1977)
A promising young modern fantasy writer, as well as a talented artist, LeMay has been been published in professional markets, such as Daily Science Fiction and reads short story submissions for Clarkesworld Magazine. Her webpage is here.

Fiction
At Daily Science Fiction:

• "Chasing Unicorns" Fantasy.
"The unicorn hunters looked like addicts. Like Shay's brother Eddie and Eddie's friends. Not the way Eddie and his friends looked when they were high, but sketchy and haggard, the way they looked when Eddie's hook-up fell through or when nobody had any cash or when cops were watching the house"

• "Dark Swans" Fantasy.
"For Halloween, Josefa's mother puts her in a pair of wings and the same white dress she wore to her First Communion ceremony, two years earlier. Sadly, it still fits. She has hardly grown. Taller, a little (not even a full inch), but she's lost seventeen pounds. She's a bird on stilt-legs. A swan with a long, skinny neck."

• "Standing Next to Heaven" Fantasy.
"Heaven is perfect. Her golden ringlets fall into her face to curl over golden eyebrows and golden lashes. Her eyes are an electric, neon blue; her cheeks are plump, like ripe peaches; and her mouth curves softly, like rose petals. She never frowns."

• "Written Out" Fantasy.
"He twitches when she sets the tip of her pen against his naked flesh, almost as if he knows what she's about to do to him. But of course that's impossible. She has never told anyone about this. About how she looks at a person, looks at him, and all she can see are words."

• At Unidentified Funny Objects: "A Midnight Carnival at Sunset" Fantasy.
"In any case, just ahead, off to your right, you see a time-worn,
hand-painted sign for a place called Kurious Kreatures. You’ve heard of
the place, of course. It’s a zoo for fairy-tale creatures. Really, a
kind of sideshow."